Les Miserables, Wilbour Translation

AT the period, although it is almost contemporaneous, in which the action of this story is laid, there was not, as there now is, a police officer at every street-corner (an advantage we have no time to enlarge upon); truant children abounded in Paris. The statistics gave an average of two hundred and sixty homeless children, picked up annually by the police on their rounds, in open lots, in houses in process of building, and under the arches of bridges. One of these nests, which continues famous, produced " the swallows of the bridge of Arcola." This, moreover, is the most disastrous of our social symptoms. All the crimes of man begin with the vagrancy of childhood.

We must except Paris, however. To a considerable degree, and notwithstanding the reminiscence we have just recalled, the exception is just. While in every other city, the truant boy is the lost man; while, almost everywhere, the boy given up to himself is, in some sort, devoted and abandoned to a species of fatal immersion in public vices which eat out of him all that is respectable, even conscience itself, the gamin of Paris, we must insist, chipped and spotted as he is on the surface, is almost intact within.